Washington Post On File Sharers vs Record Cos.

[JackSpratts]

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer

The first time Travis Daub got "spoofed," he figured faulty software was to blame. Hoping to sample the new album by Moby, he downloaded one of its songs, "We Are All Made of Stars," from the Web site LimeWire.com. But what wound up on his hard drive wasn't what he expected.

"It was just 20 seconds of the song, repeated over and over," says Daub, a 26-year-old design director who lives in Arlington. "At first I thought it was a glitch. Then I realized someone had posted this on purpose."

The identity of that someone is a mystery -- Moby's label and management team say it wasn't them. But in recent weeks, scads of "spoof" files have been anonymously posted to the hugely popular sites where music fans illegally trade songs online. Spoofs are typically nothing more than repetitive loops or snippets filled with crackle and hiss, and thousands are now unwittingly downloaded every day from file-sharing services, like Kazaa and Morpheus, that sprang up after Napster's demise.

Record labels are reluctant to discuss spoofing, but their trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America, has called it a legitimate way to combat piracy. And at least one company acknowledges that it has been hired to distribute spoofs, although it won't say by whom.

All of this suggests that the dummy files are part of a second front in the record industry's war against illegal music copying. For years, the fight focused on Web sites and their owners. Now it's starting to focus on the fans themselves.

"It just doesn't work," said David Bowie, whose latest album, "Heathen," was released protection-free. "I mean, what's the point?"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002Aug20.html